“It’s terribly risky,” I said.

“And I’m terribly reckless,” she responded.

As I went onward toward the town I looked back from the hilltop beyond the big house for a last glimpse of the reconstructed barn, and with a curious warm sense of having been admitted to a new adventure.  Here was life changing under my eyes!  Here was a human being struggling with one of the deep common problems that come to all of us.  The revolt from things!  The struggle with superfluities!

And yet as I walked along the cool aisles of the woods with the quiet fields opening here and there to the low hill ridges, and saw the cattle feeding, and heard a thrush singing in a thicket, I found myself letting go—­how can I explain it?—­relaxing!  I had been keyed up to a high pitch there in that extraordinary room, Yes, it was beautiful—­and yet as I thought of the sharp little green gate, the new gable, the hard, clean mantel with the cloisonne vase, it wanted something....

As I was gathering the rowen crop of after-enjoyment which rewards us when we reflect freshly upon our adventures, whom should I meet but Richard Starkweather himself in his battered machine.  The two boys, one of whom was driving, and the little girl, were with him.

“How are you, David?” he called out.  “Whoa, there!  Draw up, Jamie.”

We looked at each other for a moment with that quizzical, half-humorous look that so often conveys, better than any spoken words, the sympathetic greeting of friends.  I like Richard Starkweather.

He had come up from the city looking rather worn, for the weather had been trying.  He has blue, honest, direct-gazing eyes with small humour wrinkles at the corners.  I never knew a man with fewer theories, or with a simpler devotion to the thing at hand, whatever it may be.  At everything else he smiles, not cynically, for he is too modest in his regard for his own knowledge; he smiles at everything else because it doesn’t seem quite real to him.

“Been up to see Mary’s new house?” he asked.

“Yes,” And for the life of me I couldn’t help smiling in response.

“It’s a wonder isn’t it?”

He thought his wife a very extraordinary woman.  I remember his saying to me once, “David, she’s got the soul of a poet and the brain of a general.”

“It is a wonder,” I responded.

“I can’t decide yet what chair to sit in, nor just what she wants the kids to do.”

I still smiled.

“I expect she hasn’t determined yet,” he went drawling on, “in what chair I will look most decorative.”

He ruminated.

“You know, she’s got the idea that there’s too much of everything.  I guess there is, too—­and that she ought to select only those things that an essential.  I’ve been wondering, if she had more than one husband whether or not she’d select me——­”

The restless young Jamie was now starting the machine, and Richard Starkweather leaned out and said to me in parting:  “isn’t she a wonder!  Did all the planning herself—­wouldn’t have an architect—­wouldn’t have a decorator—­all I could do—­”